You know how I made a remark last week about the fact that, now that I’m no longer in academia, I carve out boundaries with my time? And how commenter Steve had said:
When we’re in academia, we’re sorta like 7-Eleven. We’re not always doing business, but we’re always open.
(And he then offered a cookie to the first person who could name the movie reference. He’s still waiting, people! Free cookie to be had!)
The near-unwavering practice I have of restricting the number of hours I work each week is probably a rebound reaction from my days in grad school. Back then, I felt like I was always on the clock, always under pressure to be producing, no matter the time of day or year.
Well, it turns out that I was actually producing quite a lot, as evidenced by a weird discovery I made a few weeks ago. While dissertating, I used a free, web-based time-tracking tool over at myHours.com. I found it was a really helpful way of having an accurate sense of how much work I was getting done. It helped me to stay on top of my work, but more importantly, it helped combat the feeling that I wasn’t doing enough or getting enough done. You know how it is: when you’ve got all that open, unstructured time, if you take five minutes to make a sandwich, you think, “I’m wasting time!”
Well, I was poking around my myHours.com account, thinking about using it again, and I made a shocking discovery: when I was in grad school, I worked like a dog. This is what the 10 days before I got married looked like, when I was madly finishing the final draft of my dissertation:
Date Activity Task Start End Total
12/12/2005 Dissertation Writing/editing 10:00 16:00 6:00
13/12/2005 Dissertation Writing/editing 10:00 16:00 6:00
14/12/2005 Dissertation Writing/editing 09:30 16:23 6:53
15/12/2005 Dissertation Writing/editing 08:40 16:00 7:20
16/12/2005 Dissertation Writing/editing 10:30 19:30 9:00
17/12/2005 Dissertation Writing/editing 05:54 09:26 3:32
18/12/2005 Dissertation Writing/editing 07:44 11:50 4:06
19/12/2005 Dissertation Writing/editing 08:00 17:00 9:00
20/12/2005 Dissertation Writing/editing 10:00 16:00 6:00
21/12/2005 Dissertation Writing/editing 06:30 16:30 10:00
22/12/2005 Dissertation Writing/editing 05:35 08:11 2:36
Now, for those of you who haven’t left academia, you might not be particularly surprised by this. Working for 6- 7 hours a day on your dissertation, with a few 9 or 10 hour days, sprinkled with a few 2 or 3 hour days, might actually be pretty representative of grad student hours. But for me, I saw this and thought:
a) why did I have the constant feeling that I was frittering away my time when I wasn’t?
b) what the hell was I doing working on the weekends?
Moreover, this was clearly one of those periods in my life where I actually made my lunch the night before so that I could sit and eat it at my desk (yes, in my home office), uninterrupted. I know this because when I kept tabs on my writing time like this, I was writing. I wasn’t futzing, I wasn’t emailing, I wasn’t noodling around on Facebook (well, there was no Facebook back then). So those were solid hours of cranking out the diss. And because there was nothing I hated more than being on a hot writing streak and having to cave and give in to the demands of my stomach by taking the time to prepare lunch, I’d prepare it the night before.
The constant feeling that I should be working was something that I disliked most about grad school. Fast-forward to 2009: I really treasure having my time contained and clearly labelled with the words, “Work,” “Family” and “Personal.” When I made the decision to go into business for myself, I also made the decision that I would only do it if those boundaries around my time remained.
The beauty of this decision means that, when I’m hanging out with friends, my husband, my kid or myself, I do it with a clear conscience. I know the work will still be there when the time for work comes. And when Monday morning at 8:00 a.m. rolls around, I am excited and ready to start the week.
How about you? What would your dream hours be? What kind of lifestyle do you see yourself having at your postacademic dream job?
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I totally relate to this. One of the things I love about grad school is the flexible hours. If I want to take the am off during the week to grocery shop or whenever and miss the weekend crowds, I can and then compensate that time elsewhere. But what I really hate is the constant feeling that you should always be doing work. That when you sit down to watch an hour of TV or something stupid, you think, I really should be working. And what is really stupid, is that whenever anyone asks me to do something, it is always prefaced by, “well, I really should be working on my dissertation…”, followed by me always giving in!
The other annoying thing is that because my schedule is so flexible and because I work from home, people think I’m not really working.
Hmmm. I know a lot of self-employed people who have the same problems with the downside of flexible schedules as you did when you were a grad student. Which leads me to think that something else is going on here.
Why weren’t you able to just set clearer boundaries in grad school? And why can’t academics do so? No reason. Most of those pressures are in your head.
Of course it’s in your head. It’s not like I work all the time. I most certainly don’t and have always made sure to make time for friends, for activities I enjoy, and for eating right and exercising. The main problem is the guilt that comes along with taking that time. I think it comes from the unique position we are in doing a degree…there is a lot of pressure to finish your degree in a set amount of time, which is often too short as set by the universities. The amount of time you take to finish is in part (although yes there are def. other factors) dependent on how much time you spend on it. I kind of feel like if I am not working on it, then I am dragging out the process just that much longer. Hence it is my fault if my degree takes longer than it is “supposed to” (which in my head I know is unrealistic, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking that way).
I think another part of it is that it is a creative process. I’ve tried setting the 9-5 hours, and found that, for me, it generally doesn’t work. While all the advice out there tells you to force yourself to sit down and write, even if it’s crap, sometimes it just doesn’t happen. Sometimes I can sit down and it just flows, other times absolutely nothing. Sometimes in the afternoon I just can’t concentrate, but I’ll start working at 9pm and get on a roll. You just never know.
I am teaching right now, which I love, but it has also confirmed for me that I am not going to get caught in the sessional teaching cycle, because I really won’t finish. Now I am putting in insane hours to prep (I’ve never taught this class before), and then the little time I have left I have to work on my diss. That’s fine now when I am in a city where I know few people and there is nothing to do, but when I get back home, that would totally suck, and is not the kind of life I want to lead. I feel like the first six years even of a tenure track position would be like that…the little time you have when not prepping two or three new courses needs to be spent pumping out articles and working on your book so you can get tenure. Do I love it enough to sacrifice a work/life balance? Ultimately I don’t think so.
Jo: Honestly, for me, running my own business feels NOTHING like being in grad school. Being able to turn off my computer and walk away is actually quite easy. Being able to sit down and turn it on is very easy, too. When I was in grad school, both of those things could be a struggle. But your comment does remind me that flexible hours just work hours work better for some folks than others, regardless of the nature of the work!
Heather: I think your comment will resonate with a lot of people. Feeling like you’re always on the clock, even when you’re not “producing,” is a major challenge. But you’re actually on a couple of different clocks, and one of them, like you say, is the expected degree completion time. Woven into that are all of those feelings of guilt and failure that I’ve posted about before (you know, the stuff about finding “fault” if you take longer than the university says you’re supposed to). The creativity involved in writing does make it difficult to apply a Protestant work ethic to the process. And that produces itself a kind of painful feeling: you feel like you can’t just wait around, hoping that inspiration will strike, and yet, without that creative pulse, writing is excrutiating. And bravo on deciding not to get caught in the sessional (that’s Canadian for adjuncting) trap.
This reminds me of a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon about time constraints and the creative process—Calvin has to write a paper for school and laments “You can’t just turn on creativity in a faucet.” He says you have to be in the right mood, and when Hobbes asks him what that mood is, he says “Last-minute panic.” Resonates with me pretty well…
But one thing I’m really looking for in a real-world job is something where the work doesn’t follow me home. A 9 to 5 office job, for example, has set hours, a set workplace, and a set salary attached to those hours at that same workplace. School work, however, is pretty open-ended, and the only thing actually “set” is class and lab meetings. The bulk of your workload (i.e. studying, writing, doing research) you’re expected to accomplish during your “free time”; and although it’s really not hard to set boundaries and goals for yourself, my own self-discipline is not as good a motivator as the threat of nasty institutional marks and truancy notices. And so without any type of “official” schedule demarcations, the freedom to do my work whenever I want also allows for the freedom of work to encroach on my mind and guilt whenever it wants.